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Street Moves, in the TV Room

KEN SWIFT, Jazzy J, Pop Master Fabel: names once familiar only to hip-hop fanciers are on the lips of young dancers across New York City. Pioneers of street dance, a style born on the sidewalks of the Bronx in the late 1970s and ’80s, these performers now lead technique classes at Peridance, a dance school in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. On a recent Wednesday evening, while a piano accompanied a ballet class not far away, Jazzy J, dressed in loafers and an open button-down shirt, demonstrated the fundamentals of popping to a group of students at the studio.

Facing the mirror, he first led the class in a series of warm-up exercises. Popping involves isolating and contracting muscles in different parts of the body, like the wrist, elbow or shoulder, so that the body appears to jerk or pop when the muscle is released. Looking just like a ballet class, except for the sideways caps and T-shirts, the dancers followed Jazzy J’s every step, repeating the movements first on one side of the body and then on the other. He gradually added more complex combinations, building on the earlier steps.

Dance schools like Peridance, Broadway Dance Center and the Millennium Dance Complex in Los Angeles have offered classes in the basics of street dance for years, but only recently have they turned close attention to the intricacies of the style — techniques like popping and locking — largely in response to a wave of television shows that have caught the interest of a new generation of students.

It seems as if every channel worth its programming salt, from broadcast networks to TLC, Lifetime and Bravo, has trotted out a dance-based reality show. As an unexpected side effect, street dance is now being popularized through television and on the shows’ Web sites, and newer moves are being documented and codified in a way not seen before.

Street dance has grown so popular, said Jerry Mitchell, the Broadway choreographer, who acted as a mentor on Bravo’s “Step It Up & Dance,” that almost every dance reality show features it in some way. “The hip dance of the ’60s was the twist,” he said. “It was done every single way. It was a phenomenon. What’s popular right now is club dancing. It’s street dancing. It’s very much in vogue.”

Not surprisingly, MTV has helped drive the interest in street dance with “America’s Best Dance Crew,” which begins its second season on June 19. The show, the brainchild of Randy Jackson of “American Idol” fame, pits dance crews from across the country against one another and enlists a panel of judges to offer technical opinions. Viewers vote to decide who continues in the competition.

“What it’s really doing is educating people about hip-hop,” Mr. Jackson said in an interview. “It’s not just about one move,” he added. “Hip-hop is way broader and more creative.”

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The Los Angeles auditions for Season 2 of Americas Best Dance Crew on MTV.Credit
Chris Polk/MTV

The members of last season’s winning crew, JabbaWockeeZ, are among the new dancers helping to teach and formalize street dance. In MTV’s studios, while waiting to perform on the Spanish-language version of “TRL,” “Mi TRL,” with crowds of teenagers screaming outside, members of the crew talked about how they saw their role.

“B-boying, when it first came out, it was such a big deal, like Rock Steady Crew, Electric Boogaloo,” said Chris Gatdula, 26, referring to the particular type of street dancing he does. “When they used to be at the clubs, they used to be the headliners. Now with ‘America’s Best Dance Crew,’ we’re at the forefront of the next generation to be able to show everybody what we do.”

On “TRL” JabbaWockeeZ demonstrated moves from its routine on “America’s Best Dance Crew,” some of which were then broken down in further detail on the channel’s Web site, in a section called “Dance Lessons.”

Mr. Gatdula said that dance was always something he wanted to do, but that his main goal was to finish college. “My family, they wanted me to be a doctor: normal, typical Asian parents. I chose to take a different route.”

He graduated from the University of California, San Diego, before focusing full time on dance. Many of the crews featured on the shows have a similar suburban background and learned their moves not from plunking down cardboard on the sidewalk but from watching videos.

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Some street-dance originators, including Thomas Guzman-Sanchez, who directed the recent documentary “Underground Dance Masters: Final History of a Forgotten Era,” have questioned whether television is the best means to showcase an art form with roots so far from the mainstream and whether the teaching of street dance on TV is essentially at odds with the unpolished, renegade spirit of the style.

“Hip-hop being watered-down can happen with the media, but we do study up on our roots,” said Benjamin Chung, another member of JabbaWockeeZ. “We realize through the show that this may be some people’s only exposure to hip-hop, so we do feel we have a responsibility to portray it correctly.”

“When someone says break dancing, we correct them and say it’s b-boying,” he continued, referring to a common misuse of the word. (Break dancing is a general term used mostly in the news media and by amateurs, whereas b-boying specifically refers to toprocking, downrocking, freezes and power moves.)

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The choreographer Tina Landon, center, on an episode of Bravos Step It Up & Dance.Credit
Isabella Vosmikova/Bravo

Tony DiSanto, the executive vice president for series development and programming at MTV, said: “It’s one thing to watch the spectacle of the thing, but with the judges there’s an added layer for the layman. The judges were chosen for their ability to break down the moves, call out the moves and point out imperfections or perfections. They bring credibility.”

And thanks in part to TiVo, “you can replay and really analyze the dance moves,” Mr. DiSanto added. He said the network had even considered how the show was shot, choosing different camera angles “so that you could really break it down.”

Professional dancers have routinely relied on video to learn choreography, but now audiences of all shapes and sizes can log on or tune in to learn how to dance. “You can learn any type of dance if you put your mind to it,” said Shane Sparks, a judge on “America’s Best Dance Crew,” “so the fact that these shows are on TV and you can TiVo it and rewind and fast forward. These shows are going to change the way people see dance.”

Mr. Sparks, who teaches at the Millennium Dance Complex, said he has noticed an increase in the number of students. “My older class is always packed, but now my kids’ class is too,” he said. “It’s really crazy. These kids, they’re coming from all over.”

Nickelodeon may be partly responsible for some of those students as well. “Dance on Sunset,” a show aimed at tweens that will feature a guest appearance by Janet Jackson this week, presents a variety of styles, including street dance, and children can learn dance moves on the network’s Web site and submit their own.

“It’s great for the kids to be able to identify and say I want to move like her or him and practice their moves in front of the mirror, and now they can download them,” said Marjorie Cohn, executive vice president for original programming and development. “Any show has an interactive component now. It’s just the way kids are watching TV.”

Mr. Jackson of “America’s Best Dance Crew” agreed, adding, “People come up to me all the time and say, ‘I thought this was only for people in the ’hood,’ but the show prompts kids from all over the country to go to their computer and learn.”

Still, there are many dancers who say there is no substitute for old-fashioned classroom instruction. “If you really want to be a master of it,” said Dave Scott, a dancer and choreographer who appeared on Bravo’s “Step It Up & Dance, “and get to the basics of where it comes from and learn those moves, there are classes all over the place.”